1. New Testament Introduction

New Testament Introduction is one of the major fields of New Testament studies. New Testament Introduction covers various topics which aid in our understanding of the New Testament. Some of the topics covered include authorship, canonicity, recipients, the date of authorship, occasion, themes, history of interpretation, genre, and structure and/or outline.

Such introductions are typically quite technical and may include extensive bibliographical information. There are books that solely focus on New Testament Introduction such as the Carson, Moo Introduction and the Thiessen Introduction (see Other References). Many technical commentaries also focus on New Testament Introduction: Timothy George’s commentary contains an extensive introductory section (see Commmentaries) as do several of the other commentaries I’ve listed.

The background information that New Testament Introduction provides can be helpful for determining the meaning of a given word, sentence, paragraph, or even an entire book. That is why we want to spend some time on the subject for Galatians.

Both internal (the Bible itself) and external sources (other documents, archeology, etc.) are used to develop New Testament introductions.

For different books of the New Testament different topics may be of special usefulness or interest. For Galatians we especially will want to review the occasion that prompted Paul to write the letter and also to review the key themes of the letter to get some idea of Paul’s approach to responding to the occasion. A good outline is always helpful so we will want to consider that as well. The Reformers utilized Galatians a great deal. It was certainly a favorite of Martin Luther’s (see Martin Luther on Galatians). So it will be interesting to get some background on the interpretation of Galatians in the modern era.

2. Author

We do not need to focus on authorship because virtually no reputable New Testament scholar denies that Paul wrote Galatians. In both Galatians 1:1 and 5:2 Paul asserts that he is the author of Galatians.

3. Canonicity

Because Paul’s authorship is not credibly disputed neither is the canonicity of the letter.

4. Recipients

We know with certainty that the recipients were the people who belonged to the churches of Galatia (Galatians 1:3). But we cannot be certain how Paul is using the words Galatia and Galatians. The question is usually summarized as “were these churches in North Galatia or South Galatia?”. The answer had usually been North Galatia up until recent times. The North Galatia position could also be called the ethnic position: the Galatians would then have been Celts. The South Galatia position could also be called the provincial position: the Galatians would then have been residents of a Roman province known as Galatia.

Sir William Ramsey (1851-1939) put forward solid evidence for the South Galatia position which he obtained by working on the ground in the territory that had been designated as Galatia (now known as Türkiye, formerly Turkey). I accept the South Galatia position as more likely. But the impact on how one interprets Galatians is relatively minor either way. Correlations between Acts and Galatians can certainly make use of the chosen recipients and the chosen date. These choices in turn can also be influenced by attempts to correlate Acts and Galatians.

5. Date

The date when Paul wrote the letter to the Galatians is also difficult to pin down precisely. Scholars credibly defend a range of dates from AD 48 to AD 57. Certainly it must have been more or less sometime during that range. Without going in to details I am going to stick with the earliest date (AD 48). That choice makes Galatians quite possibly Paul’s earliest preserved letter. I find the arguments for South Galatia and AD 48 taken together seem most likely.

6. Occasion

Why did Paul write this letter? Paul gets to the reason he wrote the letter quite quickly:

6I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— 7not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. 8But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. 9As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

Galatians 1:6-9, ESV

A false teacher or false teachers had started to turn the Galatians away from the true gospel. Paul implies that the Galatians were turning to works righteousness as he elaborates on the time he opposed Peter at Antioch:

15We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; 16yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.

Galatians 2:15-16, ESV

We could cite several more passages from Galatians on this point. It becomes evident upon reading the letter that a false teacher or false teachers were trying to draw the Galatian believers into a form of Judaism. The situation in the Galatian churches alarmed Paul greatly. This letter is Paul at his most agitated and abrupt.

7. Key Themes

Galatians is thematically rich. As a starting point I list below the key “theological themes” that Douglas Moo identifies in his commentary on Galatians (Baker Exegetical Commentary on Galatians, pp 75ff):

  • Salvation History and Apocalyptic
  • The Gospel
  • Christ
  • The Spirit
  • The Law
  • The Christian Life
  • The Faith of Christ
  • Justification/Righteousness

Timothy George calls particular attention to true Christian freedom as a key issue in Galatians (Galatians: The Christian Standard Commentary, p 209). He, like many before him, calls Galatians “the Magna Carta of Christian liberty”. He also suggests that Galatians 5:1 “has to be considered one of the key verses of the epistle.” (p 458).

We are using 5:1 as our focus verse for this series: “Stand Firm: Do Not Submit Again”. We will have to be careful about Christian liberty. It is not freedom to sin; instead, it is more like freedom from sin.

Richard Longenecker approvingly quotes H. D. Betz about this freedom Paul mentions in 5:1. This freedom

“is the central theological concept which sums up the Christian’s situation before God as well as in the world. It is the basic concept underlying Paul’s argument throughout the letter”

Galatians, Volume 41, World Biblical Commentary, location 12,270.

Through out the letter we will be seeing why the Reformers came to believe that justification is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone in no small part because of Paul’s letter to the Galatians.

We will inevitably be interacting with all of these themes as we work through Galatians.

8. History of Interpretation

We will confine our history of interpretation to the modern era (1500 to the present), but we acknowledge that the Fathers and Schoolmen did make contributions to our understanding of Galatians. But it was at the Reformation that Galatians began to be very important to the development of Reformed soteriology. The Protestants used Galatians and Romans extensively in their ongoing debates with Roman Catholicism. It seems to me that Luther, Calvin, et al had to deal with problems analogous to those Paul dealt with in Galatians. Some scholars assert that they over-projected sixteenth century issues back into Galatians. But the way I see it is that Paul had to deal with works-righteousness and so did Luther and Calvin and so do we.

Occasionally we will be considering Martin Luther’s analysis of Galatians as we work through the text. His comments on the Law/Gospel distinction will be of particular historical and theological significance to us.

Both Luther and Calvin saw that Galatians answered to many problems that Christians faced in their day. Crucially, “how [does] one obtain right standing before God?” (George, p97).

Many of the Puritans continued in the Luther/Calvin line of thought on Galatians and salvation. But slowly, Evangelicalism drifted from Calvin and the Puritans on salvation. By the time we get to the twentieth century we encounter the New Perspective on Paul (NPP). As is often remarked anything but the old Protestant view of Paul, salvation, Galatians, and Romans would be acceptable to many modern theologians.

The NPP started a very scholarly trend to enable abandonment of the Old Protestant Perspective on Paul (OPPP). There are things we can learn from NPP scholars but their reading of Paul distorts the gospel and the law not much less than Paul’s original opponents distorted the gospel and the law.

Although NPP covers a wide range of views what I particularly object to is the basic concept of “getting into the community (the universal, invisible church) by grace” but “staying in that community by works”. NPP and similar trends are very widespread in our own day. We need to bring folks back to the old Gospel of Jesus, Paul, John, the rest of the Apostles, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, …

We will focus on what Paul teaches but we will have to mention the deviations that trouble us as we go.

9. Genre

There is some discussion in the literature as to whether Galatians is a letter or an epistle. The former indicates an informal letter and the latter indicates a formal letter. Galatians definitely matches the style of an informal letter. I don’t think the genre designation has much impact on our interpretation in this case.

10. Bibliography

For our purposes I have documented most of the books that I am using for this sermon series in Commentaries on Galatians. If I add books to the list that I am using I intend to update that post accordingly. Note that the bibliography post covers more than New Testament Introduction. I used many of the listed books to compile this summary of introductory matters.

11. Outline

I have chosen to follow Timothy George’s overall outline. It is simple and helpful. Of course we always have to be careful about imposing structure or meaning upon the words of a book of the Bible. We use such outlines to organize our thoughts about the book but we try not to impose those ideas on the book. Many scholars utilize similar outlines of Galatians. There is some variability in where the second major section ends and the third major section begins. We can look into that a bit when we get there.

Below is the top-level outline that Timothy George provides in his commentary.

  1. History: No Other Gospel (1:1-2:21)
  2. Theology: Justification by Faith (3:1-4:31)
  3. Ethics: Life in the Spirit (5:1-6:18)

We can easily remember this outline. Each section spans two chapters: (1) History, 1-2; (2) Theology, 3-4; (3) Ethics 5-6.